Nurturing joy, lightness and space – whilst adapting to life in China…now France!

Monthly Archives: May 2013

My family of 4 will move from sunny Santa Barbara (California, USA) to Shanghai, China in exactly 7 days. Via this blog I hope to capture the ups and downs of this adventure and of life in general. So basically it is a cunning plan to turn all of those frustrating and annoying circumstances – that inevitably arise in life … and certainly more frequently when faced with living in a new country/culture – into fascinating material for my blog. I hope to provide photos and observations with a definite culinary-spin to share with any one who is interested.

“How Many?” by Lincoln Liechti

Writing a blog will also hopefully help keep me accountable to my intentions of maintaining joy, space and lightness in my life and of course, blogs are a great way for people who are far away to feel a little closer

So how am I feeling with one week to go before our move? I have very mixed emotions…. but the top 2 would have to be anxiety and excitement.

I’ve been meaning to start a blog for months – but I’ve never been good at making decisions and choosing a blog platform, theme, photo and so on was just simply far to0 overwhelming. This makes me think of a line from one of my favorite books, The Happiness Project (Gretchen Rubin): “...having too many choices can be discouraging. Instead of making people feel more satisfied, a wide range of options can paralyze them.”

Yesterday my wise sister quoted Sheryl Sandberg (of Facebook fame): ‘Done is better than perfect’ and I heard the message, made some choices and so now this first blog entry is officially done …… and most certainly not perfect!

ps. Do you like the artwork? It comes from a painted door just off State Street in Downtown Santa Barbara. I like all of the faces on the little people. “How Many?” by Lincoln Liechti, 2012 at www.lincolnliechti.com